Monday, January 28, 2008

I finally got around to adding the old blooper reel from the Gremlin movie, which you can find here. The main reason I never added it before is because it's no picnic adding videos to your site and making sure they're compatible, reliable, etc. Just slapping a video on a page is no problem, but there's a reason YouTube coverts and posts your video for you: it's a big enough hassle that most people wouldn't bother. Especially little Mandy and Chad Q. Teenybopper, who make up probably 80% of YouTube's posts and have no web savvy skills beyond uploading of pictures of passed out friends on Myspace.

And speaking of YouTube, the web standard is now of course to use FLV, or Flash's video format. So it was quite an undertaking to make sure I knew how to properly use/convert/embed FLV, but it was made much much easier by this guy here. This programmer offers a free Flash-built web player for users to control your videos with, as well as a wizard to generate the code for embedding the video with tons of options I didn't even touch. Needless to say, I wouldn't have been able to make the jump to FLV without this site.

I have been changing tons of stuff around the site lately, all fairly minor, but each change presents it's own challenge. I've actually enjoyed all the problems I've run into so far, mainly because I have yet to find one I couldn't solve. This has just further made me hope I get that job doing the WV Encyclopedia website since I'm one of those weirdos who enjoys this light web stuff.

A change of note is the new interface I created for viewing my comic. The old one just didn't fit in with the rest of the site, and seemed too clunky.

Friday, January 25, 2008

The Watchmen Movie Blog isn't updated too often but when they do update they don't jerk you around. They just recently posted some storyboard images to show off how faithful to the comic panels they're trying to be. I still have hope for this movie, partly because I want to have hope for it and partly because I haven't heard anything yet that would make me think they're doing a bad job. Though I guess they did abandon the "comic within a comic" for the main film and are just going to put it on the DVD. Maybe that's for the better? I don't know. But it does seem they're heading in the right direction. I mean one of the previously attached screenwriters wanted to update it to modern times. I can only imagine how awful that would have been. I think that just would have been a gateway to the mindset of "Well, we changed the time, so we can change ____ detail too."

So I'm eagerly awaiting this movie, but ultimately I do agree with Alan Moore that it didn't need to be taken from its native medium of comics. I think for me and lots of other fans of the book, this is going to be a "Okay, lets how close you got it" experience.

Wednesday, January 23, 2008

This looks really interesting, a movie about Mac users. And what's even better is that it doesn't seem to be shying away from pointing out how absolutely insane and pretentious Mac users can be.

Once again, for the record, I don't really hate Macs and I don't really hate the people who use them. That would be silly, just like the people in this video. What rubs me the wrong way about Macs is how people perceive them, and tend to act when they have them. Macs can do the same things as all other computers, no better, no worse. But They've gotten this reputation of being better equipped for art and design purposes just because they're trendy. A $1 watch tells time just as well as $500 watch, so there's only one reason why you buy the $500 one: to say "look what I have."

Sorry, I know this seems goofy, but when silly trends like this actually interfere with your ability to proceed normally in your chosen field it tends to aggravate you. I'm just glad I'm proficient in both Macs and PCs.